PAPAL VISIT 2018

During the preparation  for Pope John Paul the Second's visit to Ireland in 1979 two representatives of  northern loyalist militant groups - UDA and Red Hand Commandos - asked for an interview with Cardinal Tomás ÓFiaich. He met them in his home, Ara  Coeli, Armagh.

They asked him to  use his influence to persuade the Pope to come north across  the border.  They assured the Cardinal that he would be welcomed,  pointing out that all he need  do was travel through a short corridor from the Republic of Ireland up to Armagh.

The Cardinal promised  he would do his  best - many people other than Catholics wanted the Pope to come over the border and said so publicly and privately.

But no matter how many people wanted the papal visit north to happen there were political and diplomatic problems:  if the Pope visited Ireland's  northeast in the context of a visit to the south this could be interpreted as a political statement that Ireland, north  and south, was all one. If he visited in the context of a visit to Britain that could be interpreted as a papal statement that it was part of Britain.  And the British government might succeed in  becoming partners in the visit- this was a time when Vatican Radio commenting  on  Ireland referred to Britain as "the mainland".  Either way the visit could have  a political meaning unacceptable to the British government  or to many Catholics in the northeast. Which then to choose?  Neither.  The "security situation" was given as a reason for refusing the northern visit, especially the killing of Lord Mountbatten. 

There was a permanent diplomatic representative of the Pope  in Dublin, Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi. A permanent diplomatic representative in Britain, Archbishop Bruno  Heim, was living  in Wimbledon. Each was a vital link between the Pope and Catholic people in each country. However, Bruno Heim's  job as papal representative did not extend to N. Ireland. Gaetano Alibrandi's job as Papal Nuncio to Ireland did. It extended to all Ireland. The Irish Bishops however  had told him he need not be concerned  further north than Dundalk.

Who then was the effective personal representative of the Pope for northern Irish Catholics during  their years of upheaval and near disaster in the late seventies?  Apparently neither Alibrandi in Dublin nor Heim in Wimbledon. We know this  from what these men said.

 Some Catholic clergy believed  Cardinal Conway in Armagh during some of the seventies period  had undertaken the functions of Nuncio but this was not announced publicly. The Cardinal died in 1977.

However, even if  the Papal Nuncio was restricted from coming North, that did not hinder people from the North going to see him. Fortunately he kept an open door for them.

This curious situation meant that quite different accounts of what was happening in Ireland's northeast were  going to Rome. The Pope's 1979 speeches reflected little awareness of the reality of the political and church life of the tens of thousands of people who came down from the north to see and hear him. 

A few years before his visit in 1979 a programme of torture had started under government command  in  N.Ireland.  Since the end of the second world war international Catholic associations had been more and more forward in condemning torture, but at Drogheda, a few miles from the nearest identified torture centre, the Pope's well-crafted sermon did not mention this startling abuse of power and morality happening nearby.  He begged the young people however  not to use "violence", presumably against the government.

 In the years  following the 1979 papal visit other failures to recognise the real roots of the economic,  political and moral problems Irish people were  facing would be revealed.

The visit in 1979 was looked forward to with  enthusiasm and  hope for peace rather than for mere political stability.

But soon afterwards  N.Ireland  entered a period of even greater pain for both people and church.

Perhaps people expected too much, as if peace would come from leaders at the top rather than from people who too often are at the bottom.  Internationally many Christians and other religious people realised this, but governments at home and abroad were convinced that what they deemed peace could be got only by identifying and beating down their perceived enemies, even if their perceived enemies were citizens whom the governments were pledged to protect and foster.    

Pope John Paul mentioned Archbishop Helder Camara but did not stress  Camara's advice that in a spiral of violence governments are often the primary aggressors. Many of those who came to hear the Pope in Ireland may have gone home feeling  embalmed rather than enlivened, with a message of stability based on the past  rather than one of flourishing in a marvellous present and possible future.

The Irish child abuse scandal did not cause the church's chaos in the years after the Visit. It was like a tumour bursting open suddenly and revealing so many  other ills that were there as well, intellectual caging, feminine and gender restriction, over-centralisation, failure to offer  a present-day ideal of spiritual and intellectual life in which  Faith would set  us free to develop the best and  most hopeful in us all. 

But what could even a pope say unless he had sound advice about what is really happening to those to whom he is talking?  Different messages were being sent to him before he came. The most powerful was that of the British government; the most accurate and probably the politically least likely to be accepted was  going through Alibrandi. Future research may make clear what messages from N. Ireland were sent to Rome and who  sent them. Alibrandi would probably have made sure  his open door  was a help.

After a triumphant hopeful Eucharistic Congress  in Dublin in 1932 the Catholic Church could not prevent the international war starting, neither could it lessen the increasingly severe war in N. Ireland in the years after the 1979 papal visit. What seemed a triumphant church in1932 and  a confident church organisation in 1960 had to endure the loss of congregations, drastic fall in the numbers of those who wanted to be priests or members of religious orders, opposition to the church's influence on education,  accepted morality, health, welfare and control of property. Even the great Council in the Vatican in the early sixties that promised change  became a source of upset and even division in the church as some Irish bishops enthusiastically supported the Council privately and publicly but others supported it in public but not  in private, and some disagreed with it simply.

For a church emerging from persecution this need not have had devastating effect . It could instead have energised the church to find its real roots in Irish and world history, examine and refresh its beliefs and practices and do much else for the practical and spiritual good of church and state.  But problems at the roots cannot be cleansed away in a flow of gentle piety. Piety can be a result of renewal, not a cause of it. Christians had inherited a programme of  radical thinking which seemed to be going to waste.

Maybe in August 2018 Pope  Francis will show  a more critical view of  problems and potential in the Irish church and  maybe whoever drafts his speeches will have the insight and courage to tell him what he really should say to bring us along with him. Or him along with us.  

 

 

 

                                                                                                         

ORANGE CELEBRATIONS

 

(The painting depicts King William's arrival in Ireland - A figure believed to be Pope Innocent XI appears to bless William, top left)

Every year the Battle of the Boyne is celebrated in Ireland for about four months with thousands of marches  and  for one night with high bonfires. This seventeenth  century battle fought in Ireland by two kings, William of Orange, a Dutchman  and James an Englishman is celebrated - with a lot less intensity - in other countries as well, Canada, Australia for instance.  In Ireland the celebrators  are told  it was a fight between  two armies, Catholic against  Protestant, or Irish against British, a fight  between those who loved liberty and law and  those who hated both.

Some Irish people  wonder every now and then if  this monumental festival, four months of marching, thousands of processions, could  ever become a Festival shared by all Irish citizens.  After all, didn't Guy Fawkes celebrations  in England  become, more or less, festivals for, more or less, everyone, even though the annual incendiaries in parts of England still burn effigies of people whose  religion is different from theirs.   It seems lots of people join in the Guy Fawkes festivities because they have forgotten what Guy Fawkes Day is really about.

Is it possible that the Orange festival in Ireland could become a festival for everyone  when people remember what it is all about?

There are two pictures in Belfast that may help that to happen. One is at Sandy Row, another is in Stormont .

The Sandy Row one is a great mural  showing King William in all his splendour;  at the bottom of the picture is a list of the  nationalities of  people who helped King William become so splendid. The picture in Stormont is of King William but includes also a prominent person who helped William's army with men, music and wages and after the battle of the Boyne got people in Rome to sing the most vigorous of Roman Catholic hymns of thanksgiving to God, the Te Deum, for William's  victory.
Historians tell us that :

Pope Innocent the Eleventh blessed and  partly financed  William's troops and even added his own small army to fight alongside King William's at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

William's forces (30% Catholic) were led into battle by a papal brass band; and when news of the Boyne victory reached the Pope he celebrated  with triumphant religious song.

It was King James, not King William, who gave people their religious freedom :  but unfortunately James'  1689 decree  in favour of  religious liberty was replaced by William's  1691 Test Act , which allowed  only Church of England / Church of Ireland members to  vote or hold public office . In towns such as Belfast, Presbyterians, although they formed almost the entire citizen body, could not serve on the Corporation, or even have their marriages solemnised by Presbyterian ministers (so  in the eyes of William's law not only were they unmarried but they were declared to be "living  in sin"); they were fined or jailed for not attending Church of Ireland services, for teaching their religion etc. So 30,000 of them eventually emigrated to America - our loss, the Americans' gain - and thus  we find eleven or so American presidents descended from Ulster Protestant stock  - and  Davie Crockett as well.  

For the opening of the magnificent Stormont building  in 1932 the N.Ireland government sent to Holland for a portrait of William of Orange to put  in it. What they bought was an authentic contemporary portrait of William. Just before the opening ceremony by the Prince of Wales, it was noticed  that in the corner of the picture  was the Pope, his hand upraised  blessing William and his troops.  

Sadly, some time later  a Glasgow woman  visiting Stormont  tried too late to save their embarrassment  by chopping the Pope out of the picture with a knife.

So if people in England can all join in on Guy Fawkes Day by forgetting what that celebration is really about, may we ever see the day when everyone in Ireland will join in the Orange celebrations -  when we  remember what the Battle  of the Boyne was really about ?

 

 

 

LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

I met Fred for the first time in 1945. He described himself as a man  "who called a spade a spade". Indeed he did just that.  Sometimes he got into rows as a result, s mall rows that never amounted to much. A Belfast man - from the Grosvenor Road - he had been to India for a couple of years working with missionaries.  He saw living and working conditions in some parts of  missionary India  and even so he decided to come back home.  He was not one to walk away from  other people's misery so  perhaps he may have  thought missionary ways were not entirely suitable either for the people or for himself - and being a man who called a spade a spade he may have said so.  And religious orders can take just so much of that.  Anyway he came back to Belfast.

I met him in Maynooth where he was a church student three years ahead of me.  Fair haired,  bolt upright, when he wore a hat it looked like it was  put on  with a spirit level.   He kept rules - for him as for  the rest of us rules were necessary for both ruler-maker and rule-keeper,  otherwise life together could become difficult ;  Fred's rule-keeping was good, his few rows were small and polite and were mostly because, well,  he called a spade a spade. 

After Maynooth  I did not meet him much.  Then one evening in 1969 sitting  in my room,  fourth curate in a city parish in Belfast,  I heard my name called  loudly from the bottom of the stairs.  It was Fred. We talked,  he from the hallway,  I from the top stair. He was angry.  I had never seen him so angry.

Fred ! What's the matter ?

I'll tell you what's  the matter - They've appointed me to curate to this parish ......

Congratulations ...

And I've been in to see the Parish Priest and told him I'll be nothing of the kind.

But Fred,  this is a good place, people are good,  kind, ..

I did not realise then that Fred might have reason for not wanting to minister in Belfast, any part of it.  It was not about people.  It was about place.  And time.

" I have been too compliant all my life and now I'm not going to be compliant any more, I'm going to call a spade a spade".  We stood in the hall because Fred refused to sit down.  He was going to go into the Parish Priest's house again. He agreed  this is a good place to be, the people are good,  I always had welcome and  kindness in it,  he would find the same. He would not hear of it. He left me to see the PP again.

Belfast in 1969 was at the beginning of a chapter of horrors but that was not the reason we could not persuade him to stay.

He announced that if he stayed it would be a strict case of work to rule.  Not a cessation of work but a strict work to rule.  In protest against a system that  moved people around without  choice or even consultation about where they might work best or happiest for people.  And there was something about Belfast........

During the 6 months he was with us he worked to rule.  On his day off he put a notice on the door of his house with a big arrow pointing in the direction of where the rest of us lived so that nobody would be neglected.  

Recently,  after so many years, my colleague Ciarán Cahill and I pieced together  details about Fred.

In 1907  his father  was Detective-Constable Barrett. The Barretts lived on Grosvenor Road. During the 1907 dock strike "blacklegs" were called in by employers to  transport goods in the docks. "Blackleg" drivers were brought in from England to drive  the  steam-driven machines and  whatever vehicles the managers could gather up for transport. The Police were instructed to sit as guards beside each of these drivers.  Already DC Barrett had been officially noticed and disapproved of for working for better pay and conditions for police - their pay was higher than that of the workers but not all that much higher and they could be posted anywhere any time, whether they or their families liked it or not . The Police, led by Barrett, refused  to break the strike  and were suspended. Barrett was suspended and later dismissed.  Fellow RIC in many parts of Ireland combined to make him a Presentation in thanks for his work on  their behalf. Having to leave the police he got a job in a bar. He became a publican.

In August 1969 Fred was doing in the church what his father William Barrett had done in the Police in 1907.Working to rule to get fair play.

Fellow clergy  did not support Fred as the Police supported William in 1907. We should have done. We thought  this was not how we should act. Doctors, nurses, teachers and others  had the same ideal of  waiting for change rather than making it, anything  rather than "industrial" action, but eventually they realised that protective organisation  is necessary for everyone. In the mid-sixties some Catholic priests in Ireland founded a Priests Association. It was not a professional protection union but some hoped it might become that as well as an idealist vocational one. It died through lack of support and refusal of church authorities to negotiate with  it.

But what would have happened had they , as Fred put it, "called a spade a spade",  everyone,  the aggrieved and  the pleased,  to  set everything on the table and talk  about whether,  as we read in the Christian Gospel,  we would  bury our many  talents or  help them find ground in which they would  best flourish?   If we had had due process in which everyone could present and discuss what goes wrong and the genius each individual person has to develop what is good,  put  right what is wrong or unfair,  perhaps the Catholic Church's brothers and sisters - and children  - could have been spared a lot of  unnecessary hurt over our own recent  years.

Things are changing now though. There is more conversation between church authority and church workers,  more  enrichment of  the church by discovering all our talents rather than by curbing any of them.  We understand each other better,  inside church and outside it. 

After his protest  Fred got his ministry in the country.  He and his parishioners celebrated how much they valued each other - calling a spade a spade they  often said so.

 

 

SINGERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Watching the players for the World Cup lined up proudly singing the anthem of their nation, some seeming sure of the words, some maybe not so sure, you sense their pride, hope and faith.

After the game, watching men and women and their children unashamedly  weeping in defeat you wonder. People say sport is a kind of war, described in terms of attack and defence,  beginning with pride and naturally ending with tears for somebody. People say too that sport is a substitute for war - with  your games of win and lose you can dissolve real enmities in life - if ever  you feel like  scraping notches on your gun commemorating real deaths of real people who have never done you a bit of real harm then you may find opposition and victory in a reasonable  substitute.  Sad business  war, always . Sad business sport, but only sometimes.

But  sport as an image of real war never, as it were, completely leaves the field. They say one of the aims of the European Union was to do away with wars between European nations  but   memories and images of a bloody past still remain. Even in sport. The French national anthem has this :

Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us, tyranny's
Bloody standard is raised,

Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!

To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let's march, let's march!
Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!

And that even at the start of a football match !

The Belgian national anthem is a bit more gracious :

O dear Belgium, O holy land of the fathers –
Our soul and our heart are devoted to you!
With blood to spill for you, O fatherland!
We swear with one cry – You shall live!
So gladly bloom in beauty full,
Into what freedom has taught you to be,
And evermore shall sing your sons:
The King, the Law, the Liberty!
Faithful to the word that you may speak boldly,
For King, for Freedom and for Law!
To Law and King and Freedom, hail!
The King, the Law, the Liberty       !

The anthem of Russia, the 2018 World Cup host nation,  seems more civil also:

Russia – our sacred state,
Russia – our beloved country.
A mighty will, a great glory –
Yours forever for all time!

Be glorious, our free Fatherland,
Ancient union of brotherly peoples,
Ancestor-given wisdom of the people!
Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you.

The English anthem is less about the Fatherland, Motherland , Nation, and more about the Monarch, which is a fair reflection of a British  constitutional position:

God save our gracious Queen!
Long live our noble Queen!
God save the Queen!
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us:
God save the Queen!

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall:
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all. (This verse is often left out)

In  basic laws of England  power resides in the Monarch, with the Monarch devolving power to the Lords, Commons.   A  British writer described this distribution of power as being held  together not by a formal integrated written Constitution but by  a kind  of  "gentleman's agreement"  that the monarch will never grab power.  This was his reply to the suggestion that the British basic laws could too easily be taken over in a coup d'état by a faction supported by the army ! Without breaking a single British foundation law too. But of course a "gentleman's agreement" is hardly a citizens'  safeguard  if the  coup d'etat is organised  by Gentlemen !  The British national anthem refers to the monarch "frustrating  the knavish tricks " of his or her enemies - but not to the people subverting a monarch's knavish tricks if any should occur!

The Belgian anthem does a nice job of making a fine balance however between monarch, law, liberty, freedom,  singing :

The King, the Law, the Liberty!
Faithful to the word that you may speak boldly,
For King, for Freedom and for Law!
To Law and King and Freedom, hail!
The King, the Law, the Liberty!

So Belgians seem intent on shifting the primacy of monarch, law and  freedom around a fair bit so as not to let  monarch, law or even liberty get too free a hand over people!

Croatia has a nice anthem :

"Our beautiful homeland,

so fearless and gracious,

Our  fathers' ancient glory,

May  you be happy for ever.

Beloved , how glorious you are,

You are beloved, our only one.

Beloved wherever you are plain,

Beloved, wherever you are mountain."

It has been  suggested  we should remove  the blood-letting bits of our national anthems , including  Ireland's.  Sporting people ( be a sport !, they say) have the choice then, sing an anthem that reflects present courtesy  for your opponents and respect for yourselves , come what may, or repeat on the playing fields the desire to settle old scores or wage war against enemies who haven't even appeared yet.

No harm for Real Sports to take a lead.

 

NEW POLICE?

In Ireland recently Mr Drew Harris  was appointed for a five year term to head the Garda Síochána.  His salary will be a quarter of a million a year. For some people there is an important  question  to be answered : Will this decision  turn out to have been a disaster or a total disaster?

It would be a good idea  if the body making the appointment were to give us an account of the qualifications and experience of all the applicants shortlisted  and their account of their  motive for wanting the job of heading the police in the Republic of Ireland. When people join the police they may well have seen imperfections, even corruption, in the organisation they are hoping to join, they may therefore join in the hope of improving the organisation or, knowing what the organisation is really like, they may want a piece of the action. Police sometimes do.

Drew Harris joined the RUC in 1983.It was not the  RUC's  best year, in fact the RUC never had a best years since its foundation, the best it could have was toleration by about half the population and complete support of a government who benefited from lop-sided , partial political police, so much  wrong with it had shown up in spite of all the attempts to hide it. Eventually even the London government had to order some civilising to be done. So we may ask ,Why did people in N. Ireland join the RUC in the seventies or eighties, what was the motive - to help civilise the force or to have part of the action ? And if you joined to help  reform the force how did you try and how successful or otherwise were you? The history of the RUC 's transformation  into the PSNI is not one of great change or  success. It was set up as a political police and never got over it. Eventually, like many others  who had ceased to be useful to  the  government, they were eventually given a new name, a new identity, new clothes, with the fervent hope that so much of their history would be either  forgiven or forgotten.

One of the more inane suggestions for RUC/PSNI  reform was to have equal representation of Catholics and Protestants in the new force, now called a Service;  like some religious zealots  they may have thought being beaten by one's  fellow-faithful was good for the soul of both beater and beaten . However often this  was said,  Mr. Patten, the agent for change, never took seriously the advice, Don't do it, take rational - and community - advice  about it.  When government goes to such lengths to make sure you are half and half likely to be beaten up by a member of your own church, injury followed by insult now becomes  at least doubly offensive.  As a means of ensuring equality of job opportunity  50/50 recruitment could be helpful; as a rational way of civilising a police force it was irrational and even cynical. So did the applicants for this Irish job tell the appointment body  why they wanted to be police, that is, any police force mired in accusations of violations for years past and why did they want not only to join another one but to direct its policy and operation?  Let us  know what they explained to you and we will listen. Let them not explain and we may never know. We will however have our experience, the experience of our neighbours and of our fellow Irish citizens to help us know for ourselves.

Did the applicants favour a civil police, a political police alongside a civil police, or a mingling of the two? In the light - or darkness- of what happened  in both  RUC and Garda Síochána over the years we can provide our own answers if we need to. 

When  RUC changed into PSNI it was suggested to Mr Patten in Belfast that every local community should have a seat on local policing boards and even have the power to suspend named police who in their own  district did more harm than good. The suggestion died.

We have a right to hope that all our human rights and civil rights bodies and all our community associations will insist that whoever was responsible for this appointment in Dublin gives us details of all this. No names mentioned, but  previous history, motives, connections, membership of political societies, including, very much including, secret societies,  past success or failure in either correcting or supporting police reform or lack of it. Without that information and much else we are entitled to fear this appointment process  may have been either a disaster or a complete disaster for decent people who still, in spite of everything,  hope for civil and civilised policing.

A senior Garda officer is quoted as saying this selection would help, among other things, to compel the government "to address issues about state security". In the light of the present abuses of the term "National Security" by governments  this may help us answer at least one of the questions mentioned above.

For years after the Gardaí  were set up in 1923 people referred to them as the Civic Guards, or simply as The Guards. They knew what they wanted.  For the past  few years public representatives in the Dáil and elsewhere have been more and more frequently  using  the official name, Garda Síochána, Guardian of the Peace. But ideas of how to  "keep the peace" have changed in this world through the years. Present day combining  of civil - and civilised - police with "Home Security" experts, secret service experts, bugging experts, infiltration experts, agent provocateur experts , has made us nervous. And with good reason.

So we would perhaps prefer the Government in Dublin  not to package  them along  with real community peace keepers.